Archive for October, 2010

Certainly there are thousands of mushroom guides from which to choose, but I thought I’d start by giving an overview of my early impressions of the following guides, all of which I received for my birthday from family and friends after my discovery of a big puffball sparked this recent obsession with mushroom hunting. At present, my foraging grounds generally include forested and above-treeline locales in the Rocky Mountains near Fairplay, Colorado.

Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains by Vera Stucky Evenson with the Denver Botanic Gardens (1997, left), an out-of-print guide that Gregg bought me from Boulder Book Store through Amazon. (Incidentally, Amazon was selling the book for $128 to $215 yesterday, but they’re down to $25 now, so get it while the gettin’s good!) The book is tall, skinny, and colorful, with a pretty matte finish and good picture identifications. I’ve used it along with the others for all of my recent identifications, and I find much useful information therein. My only critique is some inconsistency in listing common names (sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t), which became important to me after I attended a local mushroom hike and the leader relied heavily on common names.

The morel of this story was cause for much excitement upon our arrival in Fort Collins, Colorado, yesterday afternoon. I came prepared, my mushroom identification guides in my backpack, in the hopes that the recent rains and warmer temperatures down in Fort Collins would result in some fungus growth. Sure enough, when I asked Wendy if she’d seen any mushrooms around, she replied that there were, in fact, mushrooms growing right in the backyard.

I rushed outside to find one last mushroom amidst the deep grass and dog poops in her tiny, yet lush, backyard. And it was a morel! I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d never found a morel before, but there are several varieties and they all have distinctive, honeycombed caps and are supposed to be “choice” wild edibles. Gregg was a little turned off by the presence of poop but I assured him I’d wash (even though I understand you aren’t supposed to wash wild mushrooms) and paper-towel it clean, scraping off any dirty parts with a knife.

A couple of days have passed since the last rain, so the honeycombed cap was starting to decay into brownish goo—but no matter, I’d just eat the stem this time. So I plucked the funny mushroom and showed it to Gregg and Wendy, grinning from ear to ear. Read the rest of this entry

A shaggy mane soldier who fought his way through roadpack, only to be plucked by me.

In mid-August I found a big puffball up on Pennsylvania Mountain and it ushered in a new addiction in the realm of wild edible plants—mushrooms!

My eyes suddenly opened to a whole new world of fungus, I began to discover mushrooms everywhere, only to find out later from an article in the Denver Post (“MAD about mushrooms: A foray for fungi”) that owing to the heat and constant rains we had in July and August, this has been one of the best mushroom seasons in Colorado history.

Too bad I had to go away during the height of it. I traveled to Los Angeles for a wedding and then to Burning Man in the Nevada desert (where there are no plants), coming home just in time for my birthday, for which I received five wonderful mushroom identification books as gifts—but the earth was dry as a bone and the mushrooms gone. Talk about bad timing. Read the rest of this entry

We found a healthy colony of mountain sorrel in a steep, rocky, dry creek bed above 11,000 feet this afternoon—another great discovery in an area that was starting to feel like we’d traveled it in its entirety and identified the last remaining wild edible plant therein. But today, after adding a quick scramble through the Bristlecone pines on a hillside above the mining road to an above tree line shelf, then traversing right and finding our way back down through the talus, we came upon a narrow creek bed with many small patches of mountain sorrel growing in it.

Mountain sorrel is the common name for Oxyria digyna. Like wood sorrel (Oxalis stricta, O. violacea) and even commercial spinach, Oxyria digyna contains oxalates, which should not be consumed in large doses. I’ve eaten wood sorrel plenty of times, but the mountain sorrel of Colorado (not to be confused with the low, three-hearted leaves of the mountain sorrel you find in Vermont, or upstate New York) had for the most part eluded me. Read the rest of this entry

Ok, I can’t stop myself—I must boast about yet another rousing success with these delicious fall dandelions I keep finding up on the mountainside. Whereas I served the last batch finely chopped in a yummy marinated salad, I served these latest dandelion greens chopped coarsely and fresh-tossed with baby spinach, red cabbage, red clovers, and a delicious soy-based homemade dressing. Gregg was very impressed.

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